3.2.1. Summer farms and local alignment

Principle 1. Until the mid-seventeenth century, there were no clear boundaries between summer farms. From the second half of the seventeenth century to around 1730, the commons were divided among summer farm communities and between summer farm communities and villages. It became important to establish the resource area for each user group. This changed the commons from open access to a common-property regime. The local court confirmed the new boundaries. From then on, both the boundaries of the resources and the individuals with access rights where clearly defined. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it became important to protect the boundaries more efficiently by making them more visible, by charging fines when people outside the summer farm community trespassed with animals, or by putting up fences along the boundaries. The evolution of these boundaries was a bottom-up process and very different from the land consolidation reform that took place in the parish around 1830 (see section 3.3.1).

Principle 2. The appropriation rules were enhanced continually from the time summer farms first appeared until the system collapsed. Two time periods are of special interest: (1) In the mid-seventeenth century, general rules about the days when peasants should move their livestock to and from the summer farms emerged. Enforcement of these rules increased around 1700, when the rules became compulsory. The same rules where used over large areas and were decided by the villages. (2) When the utilization of summer farms increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due to increasing population and more animals, new ways to protect and maintain the pasture were needed, and each summer farm started to adopt its own rules. The power to decide which day the animals should be moved seems to have switched from the villages to the summer farm communities. The new rules were generally not coordinated with other summer farms; for example, many summer farms did not have a fixed date for moving animals. Instead, they decided every year which day the peasants had to move the livestock. With increased pressure on the pastures from having more animals, it was important to adjust the timing of grazing to local conditions at each summer farm. Written agreements similar to village by-laws became common, with detailed regulations of the use of the summer farms (e.g. number of animals each peasant could bring and how many hours each peasant had to spend improving the pastures).

Principle 3. As the summer farms became increasingly important to the household economy, starting in the second half of the seventeenth century, an institution evolved to manage them – the summer farm community. Within these institutions, the users could influence decisions concerning their summer farms. A summer farm community could consist of just a few or up to 40 or more households. Large summer farm communities could be divided, often in quarters, and some of the decisions about management could be made in these smaller groups if other members were not affected. More important decisions in the summer farm community, such as proposing fines for rule violations, had to be confirmed by the local court. Groups often published a new regulation by reading it out loud at church. This allowed members who had not attended the rule-making meeting to contest it. Summer farm communities sometimes postponed decisions about how the summer farm should be managed if all members were not present at the meeting.

Principle 4. Users monitored their own resources at summer farms. Monitoring was a by-product of tending the animals in the pastures, and the cost of doing it was thus kept low. During the nineteenth century, when utilization of the pastures increased, monitoring changed. It was still possible for the women who tended the animals to keep a watchful eye for intruders from other summer farm communities, but it became even more important to prevent members of their own summer farm community from overharvesting and neglecting their duties. The summer farm communities started to appoint monitors or directors who were paid by keeping a share of the fines from members who violated the rules.

Principle 5. The summer farm community used sanctions against those who violated their rules. The summer farm communities gradually got more and more power to collect fines and, in the nineteenth century, had detailed rules about how much members had to pay if they violated these rules. It is hard for us today to know if the sanctions were graduated since we have no records from the summer farm communities. The written by-laws for the summer farm communities mention only how large the fine should be for violating the rule. It is likely that they first used more refined ways to make a member aware that he or she was breaking a rule, but we do not know for sure.

Principal 6. There were two arenas for resolution of conflicts related to summer farms – the summer farm community and the local court. Both were low-cost arenas, and the local court was where peasants and their organizations could bring cases and solve problems that were impossible to solve within or among the summer farm community; for example, a dispute regarding the boundary between two summer farms. We can conclude that during the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century the local courts acted to maintain an agricultural system and facilitate the economic development of the households. The role of summer farm communities in solving problems they faced developed from the late seventeenth century and agreements similar to village by-laws became more common for this purpose.

Principle 7. There are no indications that the Swedish central administration or government had anything to do with the establishment of summer farm communities. The peasants could organize the management of their summer farms based on their own best knowledge.

Principle 8. It is hard to argue that summer farms were nested enterprises in the same sense as many irrigation systems around the world (Ostrom 1992). Some of the big summer farms were divided into sections and these sections were nested within the bigger summer farm community, but there was no overarching organization for summer farms on a local or regional level.

3.2.2. Civic roads and local alignment

Principle 1. A civic road is a CPR in that it has clear physical boundaries that distinguish it from other types of land use. But the boundaries are not easy to enforce. It is difficult to prevent a non-authorized person from entering the road, i.e. to fence the road is not effective or even possible. But during the pre-modern road regime this was not a big problem. Traffic was mostly local, and the boundaries of the road and the appropriators were easy to identify. Local farmers and landowners used the civic road as a utility in their daily business, and the occasional traveler without formal access rights, usually walking, did little harm to the resource. Traffic demands changed during the modern road regime. Long-distance travel increased, the mechanization of agriculture adopted to meet a more pronounced market economy put heavier demands on the roads, and new groups of users, such as industrialists, began to exploit the roads without paying for their usage. From a CPR-management point of view, all of this created problems in identifying boundaries and individuals with access rights. From around 1850, when this process started, to 1907, the civic roads gradually lost their standing as the power of the village council was eroded. But with the new law of 1907, civic roads regained their former status and Ostrom’s first design principle was re-established. During the twentieth century, boundaries and access rights were challenged by mass motorization and changes in housing patterns following urbanization and industrialization. But to this day, the institution of civic road-keeping has managed to respond and safeguard its CPR character, and Principle 1 is still valid as a description of how civic road associations operate.

Principle 2. During the whole history of civic road-keeping, Principle 2 has been strongly upheld. The village councils and later the road associations have always adjusted to local conditions. One example is that the allotment of road maintenance work was based on both actual benefits, i.e. more use because of the size of the farm, and the amount of work needed to take care of the road (grading). Road building and maintenance have always been related to the direct benefit obtained by each and every landowner, and the same goes for the work or capital required from all appropriators. In fact, one of the qualities distinguishing civic roads from public roads is the principle of objective valuation of actual benefits each actor can get from the road and the direct relationship of benefits to inputs required. Today, each member of a road association pays a fee according to actual road use. Public roads did not (and do not) have this direct connection between input and benefits.

Principle 3. In the pre-modern regime, the village and the village council had the power to manage the roads. We do not know the exact decision procedures, but it is fair to assume that every landowner had a vote according to the size of his or her property. The village council, in their yearly meetings, made decisions on allotments and matters concerning the management of roads and other common works, such as crops and time for harvest. Each village had its own by-laws as a basis for decisions. In modern times, the road associations gradually took over and copied the function of the village council, and every member can participate in modifying the rules to meet local conditions, according to each individual allotment and within the rules stated by the prevailing civic road legislation.

Principle 4. The village council and its board had the explicit task of monitoring appropriator behavior and CPR conditions. The chair of the village board, the village eldest, had the power to issue fines if an appropriator did not follow the rules. The fines were divided into three equal shares for the council, the poor, and the village eldest. In the modern road association, the board, its chair, and members have the same roles. Board members cannot issue fines and put the money in their own pockets, but they can raise the fee each member has to pay if for some reason road use increases or if the member causes damage to the road. It is clear today, and was even more so in historic times, that the most effective monitoring comes from the fact that all members of the road association, the appropriators of the CPR, live near the road. Social control by all members is very important in day-to-day management of civic road institutions.

Principle 5. As touched upon above, the village council and its head, the eldest, could issue fines corresponding to the seriousness of the violations. The same is true in the road associations of the modern regime. But in one aspect the modern road administration has even greater power. If a member refuses to pay the yearly road fee, the board can go directly to the tax reinforcement office, and have them issue an order of payment. Thus, the state has delegated the right of taxing to a private enterprise, the civic road association, an action not common in Swedish state administration. If the member still does not pay the fee, the road association has the right to sell the landowner’s property in an “executive auction” to get its money.

Principle 6. As with summer farms, there were two arenas to resolve conflicts in civic road-keeping in the pre-modern regime – the village council and the local court. In the courts, all complaints were treated as civil cases. Today, disputes over allotments, fees, and other subjects are brought to the district court if a road association cannot settle them.

Principle 7. As has been shown, the government support of civic road-keeping has been massive. In a sparsely populated country with long distances between settlements, civic roads were an absolute necessity. The high proportion of small landowning farmers and the low proportion of great estates (a small aristocracy) made the civic roads vital for the whole road transportation system. When the public roads developed into a state-controlled and tightly integrated infrastructure system, civic road-keeping kept the principles of CPR management supported by modernized legislation built on a century-old practice.

Principle 8. As a consequence of the positive attitude from the Swedish government throughout history, civic road-keeping has been more or less organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises. However, there was no actual cooperation or contact between the various local road-keepers, village councils, or road associations until 1949. That year, a national civic road federation (REV) was formed to coordinate local road-keepers and facilitate contacts with the regional and state road administrations (public road-keeping had been nationalized in 1944). REV has about 10 000 member associations, about one-third of the total associations, and is an important partner in all discussions concerning civic road-keeping.

3.2.3. Summary of local alignment

The management and organization of the summer farms was a bottom-up process and was supported by the local court. As exemplified by the material from Leksand, peasants with summer farms solved the problems they faced, and the management institutions changed over time to solve new problems. By using the design principles, we have shown how summer farm users built a robust governing system at the local level. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the peasants had an adequate organization for management of their CPR and had created a strong common-property regime. The question is why the system started to collapse in the last decades of the nineteenth century when the local organization seemed to be so robust. At the local level, one reason for the collapse could have been that the number of animals each peasant was allowed to bring to the summer farm had decreased during the nineteenth century, thus increasing the transaction costs for the summer farms (Larsson 2009, 2012). But it is more likely that factors outside the local level were behind the rapid abandonment.

Civic road-keeping has been managed by the appropriators for many hundreds of years. Ostrom’s design principles fit very well in describing the history of civic roads. There has been pressure on the institutional setup, for example the change of authority from the village council to the modern road association. But the Swedish government has been willing to modify rules and institutional arrangements to keep CPR-managed civic roads as a vital part of the total road transportation network. All in all, the CPR institution has survived.

Both the summer farms and the civic roads could facilitate arenas where appropriators met, discussed, and made decisions, thereby building trust and reciprocity among users so they could sustain collective actions in the face of social dilemmas (Ostrom 2005).

3.3.1. Summer farms and sociotechnical alignment

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, summer farms were part of an agricultural system with good sociotechnical alignment; during the nineteenth century, this alignment became weaker. We discuss sociotechnical alignment of summer farms in relation to property rights, changes in farming practices, mechanization of agriculture, and introduction of the dairy industry. These factors made the summer farms lag behind, making the summer farms reverse salients in the new agricultural system that took shape during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.

Until the land consolidation reforms, Swedish law (Sveriges Rikes Lag [1780] 1984) protected the right to use the commons for grazing and harvesting timber, firewood, fence wood, leaves, birch bark, etc. for the subsistence of the household. All peasants had the right to extract natural resources from the commons. At the summer farms, the vast forests were usually commons, and to protect a forest from overharvest, peasants divided it into management units as discussed earlier. Before they were divided (section 3.2.1, Principle 1), they were de facto open access. The division transformed them to CPRs where members could develop institutional mechanisms to address questions of excludability and subtractability. The common-property regime that the summer farm communities developed can be understood as a way to privatize the rights to goods without dividing the goods into pieces (McKean 2000). This type of land tenure was common where the natural resources had certain features; for example, the value of the production per unit was low, the area required for effective production was large, and the labor- and capital-investing groups were large (Netting 1976).

From the 1750s to 1827, three consecutive land consolidation reforms were introduced that transformed the bulk of Sweden’s agricultural land, including commons, through 1880. The purpose was to reduce the fragmentation of many village fields and to reduce the vagueness of collective property rights by dividing the commons into private lots (Gadd 2011). When the land consolidation reform in Leksand was complete, around 1830, the former commons they had used as grazing land for their livestock was divided into many small, individually owned pieces. Each piece was too small for grazing. Since the peasants in Leksand were still deeply dependent on animal husbandry and needed summer farms and pastures in the forest, they were given the right to use the forest as pasture the same way they had used it before land consolidation.

In the long run, the main problem with the land consolidation reform for the summer farms was that ownership of the land and the right to use it was divided. As long as all peasants needed summer farms, the system still worked. But when some farmers started to leave the summer farm communities, the farms became weaker and fell apart. Every owner of land had his or her privately owned forest, and at the same time the summer farm communities used this land for grazing and collecting leaves for winter fodder. The clearing of the forest for grazing could come in conflict with logging. As we discuss later, the competition for forest resources increased from the second half of the nineteenth century when timber became a main resource. The result of the land consolidation reform was that the linkages between how the peasants conducted animal husbandry and the legal ownership of land changed. The law had earlier favored the use of outlying land as commons but later stressed the importance of private ownership. With weaker linkages between the local level and the national level, the summer farm became a reverse salient in the agriculture system and was lagging behind.

Agriculture transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the most important changes for summer farms were the introduction of crop rotation and mechanization. The introduction of crop rotation made it possible to graze and grow feed on the same arable land, and forest grazing was phased out (Larsson 2011). The mechanization of agriculture was more favorable for larger farms and farms with arable fields close to the homestead. Most summer farms were part of smallholdings with low incomes and were located in remote areas, so as the agriculture system became more tightly coupled, they could not take advantage of mechanization to the same extent as the larger farms. Following Hughes (1987), the mechanization of agriculture made the summer farms reverse salients in the new system.

The pattern of dairy produce consumption changed under the influence of industrialization and urbanization. The dairy industry that evolved became the antithesis of the summer farm, also making the latter a reverse salient in the new system. When milk came to be processed by dairies, many summer farms were abandoned due to the difficulty of carrying milk along footpaths to passable roads, but also because the demand for summer farm products decreased. A shift also occurred in the economics of the bigger farms, with production of cow’s milk growing progressively more important, at the expense of milk from goats and sheep (Larsson 2011).

3.3.2. Civic roads and sociotechnical alignment

During the pre-modern road regime, alignment problems arose gradually as the separation between public and civic roads became more prominent. From the middle of the nineteenth century, civic roads were lagging behind in both a technical and an institutional sense compared to public road-keeping. Reverse salients began to appear in the CPR-LTS constellation more regularly and with greater impact as public roads evolved into a tightly coupled system used for commercial and industrial heavy transport and eventually mass motorization.

First, industrialization and a commercially orientated agriculture put heavier demands on all roads, which affected durability, carrying capacity, and geographical tracing. The state road board and its regional offices met these demands by new road-building technology and organizational innovations for better roads adapted to the new forms of traffic. Business organizations from Swedish industry also joined forces with road engineers to tackle the task of “industrializing” the Swedish road network” and to change the road administration into a “technically rational” bureaucracy, all efforts leading to the “technification” of Swedish road-keeping (Blomkvist 2001). But in this wave of standardization and modernization, the civic roads were left behind. The focus was on the public part of the road network: civic road-keeping had become a reverse salient in itself during the first decades of the twentieth century.

After almost a decade of no action, focus was put on the civic roads to remedy the reverse salient and to create better alignment between the LTS and the CPR parts of the constellation. The 1907 law on civic road-keeping mentioned earlier was a first step. Its most important statue was that not only individual landowners but also commercial interests and industrialists had to contribute to civic road-keeping. Thus all actors using the roads were forced to pay according to usage. At the same time, the state road administration began to take interest in the technical standard of civic roads. They appointed regional road engineers to give advice on pavement, durability issues, and so forth. Altogether it strengthened the linkages between organizations on different levels. In 1918, the government decided to fund civic roads of particular importance for industry and commerce. The road associations managing these roads received cost coverage on some parts of their maintenance if they promised to keep the road open to all traffic. Funding is still an important tool the state uses to convince road associations to cooperate.

In the mid-1930s, however, civic road-keeping was contested, and acute reverse salients began to surface. Private automobiles began to invade the countryside, and civic roads were used for recreational purposes. The civic roads’ connection to utility and agriculture weakened. The private car also demanded straighter roads due to its speed. Because of development in the public road system (the LTS), pressure was put on civic roads (the CPRs) to adopt new standards and align with the larger system. In 1939, renewed legislation on civic roads was passed that reinforced the power of the road associations but also required tighter alignment with the state road system. The state road administration got a firmer grip on deciding technical standards, and the surveyor bureau (lantmäteriet) was instructed to monitor the road associations and their boards on land permits, accounts, and allotment of road responsibility among members. The linkages between organizations on different levels became stronger.

At the local CPR level, these system changes originating in the LTS created real problems. After World War II, when mass motorization exploded and Swedish people got the appetite for and the means to have recreational homes in the countryside, civic roads were reaching maximum capacity. First, because of the sheer number of cars that deteriorated the road structure, and second, because the new recreational inhabitants were not members of the original road associations and thus used the road without contributing to its sustainability. Civic road-keeping was at the brink of “the tragedy of the commons.” In this novel situation, due to changes in the LTS, road-keepers had a hard time upholding Ostrom’s principles 1–4 (see section 3.2.2). The solution was a rise in state subsidies and the introduction of better cooperation in road maintenance technology between the state road administration and the road associations through the creation of the regional road offices focused on civic road-keeping. The road associations also obtained a stronger mandate to close down their roads without the risk of losing state funding in case of damage risk to the road. Recreational residents were forced by legislation to join the road associations and take full responsibility. Another institutional arrangement was the government-initiated creation of REV to coordinate and assist local road associations. Increased traffic also put pressure on the civic road-keepers to align with the LTS standard of road signs, traffic rules, and speed limits. When the Swedes changed the driving side of the road from left to right in 1967, the civic roads had to follow suit.

Presently, one of the biggest problems facing civic road-keepers is the reorganization of the state road administration, which happened in 2010. Road, railroad, air, and sea traffic administrations were merged into one gigantic organization – “Traffic Administration” (Trafikverket). Even though civic road associations had often complained about poor alignment with the old state road administration, this new reform has added to the difficulties. One stress factor, a reverse salient, is the division of state funding and monitoring of civic road-keeping into seven different bureaus and administrations on state and regional levels within the Traffic Administration. This new organization effectively precludes all efforts to create overview and alignment.

3.3.3. Summary of sociotechnical alignment

During the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, summer farms lost their sociotechnical alignment to the agricultural LTS they were part of. When a new agricultural system evolved, summer farms lagged behind and became a reverse salient within the system. Important factors to consider in the new sociotechnical system and the reasons behind the decline of summer farms include changes in property rights, the introduction of crop rotation, mechanization of agriculture, and the introduction of the dairy industry. To solve the problem, peasants could change the summer farms to fit into the new system or abandon them (Hughes 1992). History shows that the peasants chose to do the latter, and the result was a swift decrease of summer farms (Larsson 2009, 2012).

Civic road-keeping faced many obstacles when the public road network changed to a centrally planned infrasystem designed for heavy traffic and the private car. Technical and institutional mismatches were more the rule than the exception. But, in most cases, the road associations kept their influence over civic roads because they were able to adjust to the development in the LTS. All in all, the history of civic road-keeping, especially after 1945, is the story of the regular appearance of reverse salients due to bad alignment in the CPR-LTS constellation. But the principle of CPR-managed road-keeping in the nodes of the LTS has prevailed. Civic roads as a CPR institution have survived because great efforts have been made to resolve reverse salients in the CPR-LTS arrangement. One such effort was improvement in the linkages between different governing levels during the nineteenth century when the civic roads were under stress. The appropriators clearly understand that there is no realistic alternative, and the government knows that it would be impossible to incorporate the civic roads into the public road network. According to experts, the price tag for maintenance of CPR-managed civic roads is only half the cost of maintaining equivalent roads under public management (SOU 2001). Civic roads are good business for the Swedish state.

3.4.1. Summer farms and contextual alignment

To fully understand why summer farms disappeared when a new agricultural system evolved, one also needs to consider their contextual alignment. Important changes for the summer farms were the new value placed on forest resources, the importance of roads and trucks, and changes in the textile industry. It is sometimes hard to distinguish sociotechnical alignment from contextual alignment, but the main difference is that changes in the contextual alignment occur outside the CPR-LTS constellation but affect it.

When the agricultural system that the summer farms were part of was in its momentum, there were few contradictions between using the forest for grazing and other uses. For example, killing predators like wolves and bears was encouraged by the law (Sveriges rikes lag [1780] 1984). Charcoal burning and firewood collection improved the pastures. Even though permission was required to use fire in the forest to improve the pastures or establish a temporal field and the central government tried to limit the use of fire, it was a well-established practice. Peasants had the political position to change the constitutional rules and ease the restriction during the eighteenth century (Kardell et al. 1980; Bäck 1984; Larsson 2009). During the nineteenth century, views of the forests changed and the main resource became timber; use of forests for grazing was viewed as a threat to successful timber management. Legislators, forest industry, national authorities, and agricultural interest organizations shared this view of forest grazing, and in the long run public opinion about the purpose of forests changed. Campaigns and propaganda against forest grazing became intense during the second half of the nineteenth century. However, for many farmers, especially in the northwest parts of Dalarna and Jämtland counties, it was not possible to abandon forest grazing as quickly as the authorities wanted due to lack of arable land in the villages (Larsson 2011). To protect forests from grazing, the Swedish parliament passed a law in 1867 to tighten restrictions on grazing rights for goats and sheep (Hahr 1906). However, large parts of the summer farm area were exempt from the new law, because goats and sheep still played an important role in agriculture and local economies (Larsson 2011). The important point here is that the law viewed goats and sheep as pests, undesirable in timber forests.

The view of forests changed between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries from being an intrinsic part of agriculture to being a natural resource that should be protected from agriculture. At the same time, the introduction of crop rotation made it possible for farmers to abandon forest grazing. When the forests lost their role as important for grazing, the agricultural system of the summer farm area lost its leverage and started to decline (Larsson 2009, 2012). It was not possible for summer farms to assimilate into the new system because they were considered threats to the forests.

Other causes for the decline of summer farms were changes in the textile industry and new clothing habits. There was a steep decline in the demands for products from sheep and goats after 1850. In the textile mills, cotton had become the staple raw material, and much of the wool was being imported, thus the numbers of sheep and goats decreased sharply. Since the increase in goats and sheep had been a reason to establish summer farms in the first place (Larsson 2009), the decrease was a reason to abandon them.

When the public road system developed in Sweden and transportation by truck and cars became more important for the new agricultural system, summer farms lagged behind because they were usually located in remote areas far from roads. However, the expansion of forest roads for harvesting timber in the 1930s delayed the abandonment of summer farms still used by households in some areas (Larsson 2011).

3.4.2. Civic roads and contextual alignment

In this section, we discuss three external processes that influenced and put pressure on civic road-keeping (and the whole road system): land consolidation reforms already mentioned, the evolution of the railway system starting around 1850, and the present-day example of the expansion of towns into areas originally intended for summer houses. These processes changed the environment for civic road-keeping and created bad contextual alignment that had to be repaired for the CPR-LTS constellation to function properly. Note that the land consolidation reform, for example, was analysed as an internal component of the CPR-LTS constellation (the agricultural system) above. From the civic road point of view, the same process is analysed as being external, part of the constellations environment.

Land consolidation reforms affected civic road-keeping in two distinct ways. First, and most directly, with the division of land into private lots, many civic roads became redundant. Civic roads were most often built on common land and stretched along the borders of fields in the village. When the map changed, some roads ended up on private property. Also, the establishment of new households outside the village centre required new roads to be built. Villages going through land consolidation reforms received assistance from land surveyors in establishing new road maps, and the government issued a regulation stating that all parties of the reform were to pay equally if new roads had to be built. Second, the land consolidation reform affected civic road-keeping in a more diffuse way. In the old property regime, the village council had a powerful position in the management of local roads and other CPR-like arrangements in the village. After the reforms, the village council and the village eldest gradually lost their positions of authority, and the principal oversight of civic roads slowly disappeared. For nearly a decade, farmers appealed to the Parliament, but government was hesitant to do anything to solve the problems of bad alignment. It was not until 1907, when the absence of village councils became apparent due to declining road quality, that legislation finally resolved the bad alignment and institutionalized the local road associations. Then 30 more years passed before a firm grip was taken on civic road-keeping by the law of 1939.

The second factor was the evolution of the railway system starting around 1850 and basically ending in the 1920s. This process had a direct effect on the whole road system, public and civic roads alike. The railway is a more tightly coupled system than the roads. When railroads and roads meet, the railroad takes precedence. Crossings had to be built so the train had the right of way. The railroad system’s explicit demands on security and technical standardization had to be met. This was a challenge for the public road administration, and the two “system builders” – the state railroad and road administrations – worked together to solve the alignment problems. But the civic road-keepers were left behind. Local road associations and village councils had no influence when the railroad crossed their roads. They had to adjust and adhere to demands of the stronger, tighter system.

The last example has to do with urbanization in Sweden today. The big cities, especially Stockholm, are growing exponentially, and shortage of accommodation makes former areas of recreational houses attractive for permanent residence. In most of these recreational areas, road-keeping is managed by local road associations. When you buy a house you are forced to join the road association and pay fees, and when demographics change, the traffic increases. Roads originally built for recreational purposes are now used all year and by more intense, work-related traffic. This leads to higher maintenance costs, including the cost of keeping roads free of snow during winter. But stress is put not only on the physical road structure. Local road associations report difficulties integrating their new members, who are often unaware of the existence of civic roads and the special responsibilities in civic road-keeping. They are used to the same standards, i.e. pavement and lighting, as offered in the public road network managed by municipalities or the state. Furthermore, these new inhabitants, allegedly, are not willing to pitch in and contribute to the road association (Blomkvist 2010). The lack of alignment in this area is discussed extensively within REV, but solutions are hard to find. Perhaps this process will ultimately change civic road-keeping near large cities by incorporating the roads into the public network. If so, civic road-keeping will again become a truly rural phenomenon.

3.4.3. Summary of contextual alignment

Summer farms lost not only their sociotechnical alignment during the decades around 1900. They also lost their contextual alignment. Three examples have been given for how changes outside the summer farms and their agricultural system affected them: changing views of forest use, changes in the textile industry, and changes in the transport sector.

Civic road-keeping and its contextual alignment have been challenged many times. We have given three examples of contextual pressure: land consolidation reforms, the evolution of the railway system, and the trend of new owners living permanently in former recreational houses in what has now become the outskirts of large cities. In the first two, action has been taken to successfully solve the problems and to regain contextual alignment. The third misalignment is not yet solved, and many actors in the road sector argue that this trend is a real threat to the CPR character of civic road-keeping.